The Best Historical Fiction Set on Islands - By Anna Mazzola

Islands, with their closed communities, their remoteness, their uniqueness, have a special place in an author’s heart. Sometimes they become not just settings, but characters in themselves. I chose Skye for my second novel, partly because I wanted somewhere cut off (as it once was), and somewhere with its own folklore, its own beliefs. Others have gone a step further and created fictional islands: Atlantis, Azkaban, Atuan, Fraxos, Hedeby, Svalvard.

Once I’d started thinking about books set on islands, and asking others to give me their recommendations, I realised that there are in fact hundreds of excellent books set on islands. These include plenty of classics (Swallows and Amazons, Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, To the Lighthouse, The Old Man and The Sea) and so many crime novels that I’m beginning to think going to small islands is a serious health risk.

There’s also a glut of brilliant historical novels set on islands. Here is a list of my top ten favourites, in which both ‘historical fiction’ and ‘island’ are given a broad interpretation. There will be many I’ve missed, so do comment below.

1. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, 1966

The novel in which Rhys gives voice to the ‘mad woman in the attic’. Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress and the wife of a man who, though he is never named, we understand to be Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester. He renames her ‘Bertha’, declares her mad, and relocates her from the West Indies to England. Written in the 1960s but set in the early 1800s, this is a key postcolonial work, which deals with ethnic and gender inequality, displacement and injustice.

2. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell, 2010 

Mitchell transports us 1799 and to Dejima, a tiny artificial island in the bay of Nagasaki where the Dutch East India Company established a trading post. Mitchell had been backpacking through the west of Japan looking for lunch when he stumbled upon the Dejima museum. ‘I never did get the lunch that day,’ Mitchell said. ‘But I filled a notebook with information about this place I'd never heard of and resolved one day to write about it.’

In the novel, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his name but falls in love with a midwife, who is spirited away to a sinister mountain temple cult. It’s a fascinating work of ideas, longing, power and corruption.

3. Secrets of the Sea House, Elisabeth Gifford, 2010

Having fallen in love with the Hebridean island of Harris and its legends, Gifford came across an 1809 letter to The Times about a Scottish schoolmaster who claimed to have seen a mermaid. From this sprang her brilliant debut, a dual-timeline novel that tells the tale of a newly-ordained priest, Reverend Alexander Ferguson in 1860, assigned to a parish on a remote part of the island. Over a century later, Ruth, raised in children's homes after losing her mother as a young child, discovers the tiny bones of baby buried beneath their new house, the legs fused together like that of a mermaid. A beautiful story of love, hope, healing and stories.

4. The Light Between Oceans, ML Stedman, 2012 

Tom Sherbourne returns home from the Western Front trenches of World War I. He and his wife, Izzy, move to an isolated lighthouse on Janus Rock off the coast of South West Australia. One day in 1926 a boat washes ashore, containing a dead man, and a crying baby. What happens next leads to a gripping exploration of grief, temptation and love.

ML Stedman said: ‘The island of Janus Rock is entirely fictitious (although I have a placeholder for it on Google maps). But the region where the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet is real, and the climate, weather and the landscape are more or less as I’ve described them. I wrote some of the book there: It’s a very beautiful, if sometimes fierce, part of the world.’ And that is very much reflected in the novel.

5. The Book of Night Women, Marlon James, 2013 

Marlon James’ searing second novel, The Book of Night Women, is set on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 18th century.  It tells the story of green-eyed Lilith, born into slavery and orphaned at birth by her 13-year-old mother, one of the many slave girls raped by their white masters. Forced to grow up fast, Lilith begins to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman. By no means an easy read, but an essential one, it’s a story that culminates in slave revolt, blood and atonement.

‘I don’t consider myself a historical novelist,’ James has said. ‘But I am obsessed with the past. And I am obsessed with stories that weren’t told, or that weren’t told in a good way.’ As the African proverb goes: ‘Until the lion’s story is told, the story will always belong to the hunter.’

6. The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge, 2015

 

The Lie Tree, Hardinge’s seventh novel, opens with 14-year-old Faith Sunderly and her family leaving their home in Kent for the isolated (and fictional) island of Vale. Faith, forever spying, discovers they have fled to escape the growing scandal around her father’s recently published scientific findings. When her father is found dead, Faith sets out to find out what has really happened and discover the nature of her father’s investigations. This leads her to a tree that feeds off lies.
Supposedly YA, but really for all ages, this is one of my favourite Victorian-era novels, and definitely my favourite one about lying plants.

7. The Winter Isles, Antonia Senior, 2016 

Antonia Senior plunges us in to the raw and often vicious world of 12th century Scotland where Somerled, son of an ageing chieftain, must prove his own worth as a warrior. It’s a compelling story of action, warfare, love and sacrifice and one which is clearly rooted in Senior’s love of the West Coast of Scotland.

‘All my favourite places are islands,’ she says, ‘From Corsica to Mull, Iona to Ponza. As a visitor they offer a manageable, enclosed world to explore. As a writer there is something magical about islands: a world within a world. There is often surface beauty, and a sinister underbelly. They are enclosed spaces, in which people are too close to each other - that strange interplay between isolation and oppressive familiarity.’

8. Mussolini’s Island, Sarah Day, 2017 

In 1939 a series of Sicilian men were taken from their homes and imprisoned on the island of San Domino in the Adriatic Sea. Their crime? They were gay. Out of this little-known slice of history, Sarah Day has created a fascinating novel.

Francesco, a young gay man from Catania who grew up without a father, is one of those arrested and herded into a camp on the island. Meanwhile, a girl called Elena dreams of escape from her island home, imagining Francesco will save her.

‘It’s such a beautiful, peaceful place,’ Day says of San Domino, ‘and yet was used for such a dark purpose. As a visitor, arriving by boat, the island seems so idyllic, but as soon as you put yourself in the mind of a prisoner being brought there against your will, you realise how terrifying it must have been to arrive somewhere so isolated and stark. That context was really important to me when writing the book-an island can be a paradise or a prison, depending on who you are and the time in which you live.’

9. Sugar Money, Jane Harris, 2017 

Martinique, 1765. The charismatic but damaged Lucien and his more cautious older brother Emile are tasked by their French master with returning to Fort Royal in Grenada to bring back the slaves stolen by the English. Emile knows this to be a reckless mission, but, as with most things in their lives, it is something in which they have no choice. What follows is part adventure, part tragedy, and entirely compelling.

Harris has created a setting we believe in and characters we desperately want to survive. There is nothing sweet about Sugar Money, nor should there be.

10. Mr Peacock's Possessions, Lydia Syson, 2018 

It is 1879 and Mr Peacock and his family are struggling to scratch a life for themselves on a tiny volcanic island off the coast of New Zealand. At last, a ship appears, bringing six Pacific Islanders who have travelled across the ocean in search of work. All seems well until Mr Peacock’s son, Albert, goes missing.

This is a gripping mystery is woven from strands of real history. As Lydia Syson explained in her interview with History Girl Adèle Geras, the story came from her husband’s ancestors, Tom and Federica Bell, who in 1878 decided to take their six children to make their home on an uninhabited Pacific Island called Sunday Island. ‘The captain who brought them sailed away, promising to return in three months. They found their provisions were rotten and they never saw that ship again.’

Again, the island setting is crucial to the story, as Syson herself makes clear. ‘The island – so beautiful, so fertile and yet so treacherous - was a gift in terms of setting, plot and metaphor.’

__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, set on the Isle of Skye, will be published in July 2018.

https://annamazzola.com 
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

Suicide in Rome - by Antonia Senior

This week, I have been thinking about suicide.



Not, I promise, my own. I have been thinking about Roman suicide. There was a surge in suicides among Roman aristocrats under the Julio-Claudian Emperors. Suicide was a political act; and in imperial Rome, all politics must be understood in relation to the Emperor. Historian Paul Plass argues that this was game theory suicide, in which execution masqueraded as suicide. The victim could undermine the potency of the Emperor’s intent by claiming libertas – freedom - in the act of self-killing. It was a complicated dance, understood by all, in which the “first and central axiom in the political logic of suicide is the Emperor’s power”.

For the self-killing to fit into this exchange of power and agency, it was necessary to stage a "good” death. The contrast between a noble death and a deluded death is a pre-occupation of Seneca’s, and is visible in a constant theme in his drama and his philosophy.

This impression of an age with a morbid flavour is compounded by the sources. Our primary sources for the suicides in the reigns of the early emperors are Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio; all of them writing significantly later than the events they describe. Tacitus, in particular, is pre-occupied with political suicide.

It is clear, however, that for both early imperial writers and the later chroniclers, there were some familiar tropes that distinguish a good death. The first is the notion that death reveals the man. It is not enough to die, one must die well.


Bravery is crucial. Tacitus labours the duration of certain suicides, including that of Seneca, who takes an age to saw sufficient wounds in his wrists. He reveals a begrudging admiration for Petronius, whose subversive, drawn out death is a riot of feasting and excess.

Seneca: took his time

For Seneca, emulating Cato who himself emulates Socrates, it is important to die a thinking, philosophical death. Suicide is a reasonable response for a stoic who wishes to lay claim to freedom. “Do you ask where the path to freedom lies? It flows through every vein in your body,” says Seneca in his work On Anger. Historian Miriam Griffin argues that philosophy provided the etiquette and style for suicide, as well as a justification.

But how do you tell the difference between a virtuous free death and a deluded death. A “protocol of death” should be followed, to reinforce the notion that the self-killer is reclaiming freedom and virtue, rather than succumbing to morbidity. A good dinner, calm words with chosen friends, calmness in the act; all are ingredients. But there must be an audience. How else can witness be borne that reason triumphed despair? There is a theatricality necessary, then, to the political suicide.

To kill yourself in Imperial Rome meant comparing yourself to those who had gone before. For Seneca, a habitual user of exempla to define and encourage moral behaviour, it was not sufficient to emulate Cato and Socrates, he had to outdo them and become himself an exemplum.

The ultimate witness for the act of self-killing is the Emperor. Suicide was an important pre-emptive strike to avoid the Emperor’s humiliating offer of clemency. Clemency, as understood in its imperial context, was to be avoided – it is a pointed expression of the Emperor’s power and the powerlessness of the pardoned. To deprive the Emperor of a chance to offer or withhold clemency, is to assert freedom in the face of power.



This attempt to carve a vestige of virtue and freedom out of an imperial system which denies their possibility is the key to understanding stoic suicide. Stoics faced a fundamental tension between their commitment to nature and wisdom, and their necessary involvement in the public life of the state. A rational death allows this tension to be resolved. The details matter. Form matters; in part to resolve the central paradox of Roman political suicide. If suicide is the free choice of a free man, then what is suicide if the Emperor orders it?




Nero’s suicide escapes this central paradox –,at the moment of his death, he was still, theoretically, the Emperor. No-one ordered his death, although events suggested it as a rational course of action. The sources are hostile to Nero, and it is no coincidence that he bungles his suicide. No calm dinner for him, no noble witness. A ditch, a freedman, a failure of nerves. Nero begs his freedman to do the job for him, and thus shouts to posterity that he is less than a man. 

Nero: botched job

x

SWORDS and SANDALS

The revival of European Martial Arts,

by Antonia Senior

We all struggle with authenticity. How can we best approach the past, weighed down as we are by our tech-heavy, sanitised modern lives?

Last month, I wrote about sailing on tall ships, and how that has fed into my fiction. I am a great reader of swords, sandals and sails. When I came to write, I knew that some of my compulsive, eclectic reading of everyone from Patrick O'Brien to Conn Iggulden, CS Forester to Angus Donald, Alexander Dumas to Giles Kristian would leave echoes in my own work. 

All three of my first books have involved the writing of battles, the bearing of swords or the rush of sea and wind. The second of my books, The Winter Isles, presented particular problems about my relationship to the central character, Somerled, which can be summed up like this:

Somerled: A violent 12th century Scottish warlord, with a sperm-spray of offspring in numbers only matched by Genghis Khan. A father of sons who try to kill each other. A boy of MacDonald myth, who is light of heart and deep of thought. A son of the wild Atlantic seas. A monstrous fighter.

Me: A scaredy-cat Londoner. A mother who frets if her children sniffle. A starter at shadows, a concrete-walker. Weak-armed and flubbery-tummied. Someone who once saw a decapitated squirrel and has never quite got over it. 

As part of that initial process of thinking my way into his world, I persuaded a commissioning editor at the FT to take a piece on learning sword-fighting. Not namby-pamby fencing, with the silly little pointy swords - proper medieval fighting, with big, heavy swords.  

This was my first introduction to the weird and wonderful world of Historic European Martial Arts. A global, internet-linked group of enthusiasts have, for the last thirty years or so, been reviving medieval fighting techniques using the remaining fighting manuals. An estimated 13,000 people worldwide are now believed to practice the sport.

For my day with the sword-master Dave Rawlings at The London Longsword Academy, we used an extraordinary manuscript. 1.33 is a medieval fighting manual, prosaically named after its position in the Tower of London armouries' catalogue. It is the oldest surviving combat fighting manuscript in Europe, and dates from early fourteenth century Germany. It shows an incredible series of instructions on how to fight - and much to my joy, some of the illustrations show a female fighter named Walpurgis.

A page from 1.33 showing the incredible detail. 

Most of the techniques are for a sword and buckler, a small easily portable shield that is used to support the vulnerable sword hand. One lovely detail, pointed out by Dave, is that some child has had access to the manual on its wanderings across Europe, and coloured in all the bucklers...

Here are some of the things I learnt about fighting with a sword.

1. Swords are very, very heavy. Arm-trembling, shoulder-sapping heavy. This is not obvious when you first pick it up - but becomes clear seconds after holding it aloft. Muscles are a must. 

2. When you first pick up a proper sword, you will feel a fizzing glee. There is something elemental and brutishly satisfying about handling one. Any sword is Excalibur to the one holding it.

3. Looking down your sword at someone who is looking down a sword at you is very, very scary. Even when it's a nice bloke called Dave who is definitely not going to hurt you. 

4. You will think you look like Samantha Swords, the incomparably awesome champion Long Sword fighter who is a big name in the European Martial Arts world: 

5. You look nothing like Samantha Swords. And that is something you will have to come to terms with, slowly and with much regret.

6. Practice. Practice. To build the muscles, and learn the moves again and again and again, so that they become a memory in the bone. Sword skill would take a lifetime to achieve.

I decided, alas, that I was a better writer of swords than a wielder of one. 

*STOP PRESS*

Along with the HWA and a few other fabulous writers, I am curating a new monthly evening of historical fiction chat in London. The first one is on Tuesday. Look us up on https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/historia-history-by-the-river-tickets-33696646577

@historybyriver

DINNER.

by Antonia Senior

I am a glutton  foodie. I like eating, cooking and reading about food, although the gourmet spirit in me is somewhat crushed these days by the fishfinger-and-bakedbeans carousel of having fussy children.

In all the periods I have written about or researched, one of the most joyful parts has been thinking about the food. My excitement was feverish last term when my eight year old had to prepare food for a Roman feast at school. I reached for my books, lectured her on Apicius and the mis-labelling by history of the Epicureans.

'Can we just make some honeycakes from the internet, Mum?'
'No! What about a stuffed pigeon? Or olive and celery pate? Or smoked fish in vine leaves? Or...'
'Um. Can we just make some honeycakes from the internet?'
'Garum! Let's make garum!'

So we experimented with anchovies and a grape juice reduction, using a recipe from this brilliant book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Roman-Cookery-Ancient-Recipes-Kitchens-Mark-Grant/1897959605/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486827589&sr=8-1&keywords=mark+grant+roman+cookery

The garums was, you will be astonished to hear, utterly grim. We sent it into school (with some honeycakes, of course). The teacher let some of the revolted children try it. One of them knocked it over, and it fell on the carpet, drenching the floor in a pungent fishy mess.

The teacher assures me that the classroom still smells of fish when the radiators are fierce - she is remarkably nice about it.

Alongside the disastrous garum, I have had a few successes - the 17th century meat stuffed cabbage in blackberry sauce thing was lush. The braised cucumber from Rome was surprisingly delicious.

Given my interest, then, I was seriously excited to find myself at Heston Blumenthal's Dinner for my wedding anniversary this month. Dinner serves dishes (at eye-watering prices) which draw on England's rich culinary past. (By the way, Victorians are to blame for the perceived blandness of English food - pre-Victorian cookbooks are absolutely full of interesting recipes and exotic spice.)

Each item on the menu at Dinner comes with the date and source of the recipe that inspired it. I stuck mainly to the seventeenth century - my new book, The Tyrant's Shadow, is set in 1650s London, and I felt I should be loyal.

I started with the Savoury Porridge, with frog's legs, parsley and fennel, from 1660. The source is The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected by William Rabisha.

My rubbish camera phone makes this look a little pond-like. But it was vibrant, and fresh, and unctuous all at the same time. The little froggy bonbons were worth the cover price on their own. The whole thing was a delight - and tasted of hope and joy. It made me think of the date - of 1660. Too much to read into a bowl of porridge, perhaps, but I thought of the wave of joy that year as the King returned. It made me think of the contradictions of the Restoration - of Charles 2 himself, with his lush side and his scientific mind and his ability to balance different factions by always seeming to agree with everyone.

My husband, who was very tolerant about me snapping the food with my phone for this blog and wittering on about the tenuous links between Frog Porridge and the Restoration (I married him for a reason*!), had Salamagundy. This was an eighteenth century concoction of Chicken Oysters, salsify, marrowbones, horseraddish cream and pickled walnuts from The Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary by John Nott. I'd love to tell you what it tasted of, but I did not get a chance as he had snaffled it all while I was still working myself into a metaphorical frenzy over the frogs.

This, however, is what it looked like:

The main courses were not quite as mind-blowing - but still amazing. I had Chicken cooked with lettuces from 1670 - the source was The Queen Like Closet by Hannah Wolley.

Crisp-skinned chicken sitting on spiced celeriac, with braised lettuce and extra little shards of chicken skin - and other stuff I couldn't identify but was all delicious. The sauce was an onion emulsion. Reader -  Nandos it was not.

For pudding, I abandoned the 17th century and its Taffety Tart, for the brown bread ice cream with salted caramel, pear and malted yeast (1830, A new system of domestic cookery, by Maria Eliza Rundell). My dedication to my period has its limits, and frankly, for a bit of salted caramel I'd write about the economic detail of the industrial revolution. I don't have a picture - my spoon was at its work before the waiter had left the table...

I would highly recommend Dinner to anyone with a historical interest and a futuristic bank balance...
And if you are in the market for historical foody fiction: The new Blake and Avery thriller from MJ Carter, The Devil's Feast is set in the mythically sumptuous kitchens of the Reform club in 1842. It's wonderful mix of food and murder.

Martine Bailey has written two fabulous books which combine gothic horror with culinary delights - the latest is The Penny Heart.

But the best, richest, most unctuous and glorious writing about food I know is in Philip Kazan's Appetite. Set in fifteenth century Florence, it follows the fortunes of Nino - a chef of rare talent. Atmospheric, macabre, sensuous. If you can't be bothered to get all Heston in the kitchen here is my recipe for the absolutely perfect night in when it's sleety and rainy and cold outside.

Take 1 fire. Stoke into warmth and flame.
Take 1 glass of wine. Must be red. Must be dark. Must be the type to make you a bit trembly and sorrowful tomorrow.
Take 1 plate of very pungent cheeses.
Take Appetite by Philip Kazan.
Muffle children. Banish spouse. Euthenise pets.

Mix. and off you go.....


*Ps. This was our 12th wedding anniversary. At our very first meeting, at a karaoke night in a curry house, I reenacted the battle of Thermopylae with the mango chutney and the mint raita. He knew what he was getting into.....

The Triumph Tree and other wonders: by Antonia Senior

Delight I'd find in an island breast,

on a rock's peak, 

that there I might often gaze 

at the sea's calm.

That I might see its heavy waves

over the brilliant sea

as it sings music to the Father

on its constant way

.....

Columba's Island Paradise (12th century)

Translated from the Gaelic in The Triumph Tree (Canongate) Edited by Thomas Owen Clancy.

We writers of historical fiction give voices to the people of the past. But we are unsatisfactory ventriloquists, burdened as we are by our own prejudices and assumptions. 

In the rush to speak for them, we sometimes forget that our ancestors had their own voices. The period and place that I wrote about in The Winter Isles - the twelfth century West coast of Scotland -  is poorly documented.  There are no newspapers, emails, record books, letters, lost scrolls, tax records, trade receipts, census records. There is precious little archaeology. There is, however, poetry. And what poetry it is!

I was utterly ignorant of these islands' pre-modern poetic tradition until I started researching The Winter Isles. In fact, the book would never have been written unless I had stumbled across another book - The Triumph Tree, edited by Thomas Owen Clancy. It is a collection of early Scottish poetry from 550AD to 1350 AD. There are 5 languages represented: Latin, Welsh, Gaelic, Old English and Norse. 

The linguistic tangle reflects the history: borders were not neatly drawn and identity was a thing in flux. As Clancy explains in his introduction to the book, most anthologies of Scottish poetry begin in the 14th century, with the beginnings in Scotland of the use of English in written form and its cousin, lowland Scots. 

Triumph Tree attempts to rectify this omission - but there are obvious problems of categorisation. What counts as Scotland in this period? Who wrote what, and when? Early Scottish culture laid emphasis on the oral tradition of poetry. Much is lost - but what has survived is wonderful. There are various strands - the Latin poetry of the church, the gaelic bardic tradition and the Norse sagas brought by Scotland's Viking invaders. 

The poem I have reproduced above is one that I found most useful in writing my own book. It is from a tradition of poetry surrounding the life and legacy of St Columba. St Columba, an Irishman, founded a monastery on Iona in 563 AD, and the tiny island off the coast of Mull became the centre for Celtic Christianity. Celtic Christianity is marked by beautiful hymns which are rooted in the poetry of landscape, and by a tradition of works by later poets imagining themselves to be Columba. Historical fiction poets, if you like. 

 A Celtic cross on Iona

One of the things I adore about Columba's Island Paradise is the sense of the writer's spirit. How alive he is! His character shines from the page. His humanity. His quiet joy in the small pleasures. 

The ending verses read:

That I might ponder on some book,

good for my soul;

a while kneeling for dear heaven,

a while at psalms.

A while cropping dulse from the rock,

a while fishing; 

a while giving food to the poor,

a while enclosed.

A while pondering the lord of heaven,

holy the purchase;

a while at work - not too taxing! -

it would be delightful.

In his concerns and occupations he is both recognisably like us and obviously dissimilar. It is this contradiction I attempt to express continually as a writer of historical characters: the tango between resonance and dissonance. The strong woman who is pre-feminist; the warrior who is preoccupied by Christ. Like the monk in Iona, I try to make my characters feel in familiarly human ways even as they think in unfamiliar grooves.

I particularly love that phrase - not too taxing!. It makes me think of afternoons spent in the garden, reading for books for research or review - not too taxing! yet good for the soul.

The Celtic hymns have a hypnotic power and rhythm. I am a resolute atheist - and yet I always seem to write about periods in which religion is paramount. I found reading the poetry of early Gaelic-speaking Christians invaluable for trying to approach the mindset of people who think so differently, and yet live and breathe and love just as we do.

My favourite was the Litany of the Trinity, ascribed to Mugron, the Abbot of Iona in 980 AD. It is a form of Gaelic devotional verse in which God or the Saints are invoked in an incantory way. It is very long, but here is a fragment:

Perfect God.

Merciful God.

Marvellous God.

God of the earth.

God of the fire.

God of the varied waters.

God of the rushing storm-tossed air.

God of the waves from the ocean's deep house.

This is a God who belongs in the waters now cruised by comfortable Calmac ferries. This is a God whose word is audible not inside a cathedral, but out on the white strand at Iona, with skuas wheeling overhead and a raging sea beyond. 

My husband is learning Scottish Gaelic, and our house is full of extraordinary modern Gaelic poetry which carries the spirit of the early writers: it is rooted in landscape, bold in form and utterly unembarrassed about being beautiful. 

I tried to borrow a little of this spirit in writing The Winter Isles. Perhaps I pulled it off, in places. But if I did, I owe all to The Triumph Tree, and the man 900 years ago who found delight in an island breast, watching the sea's calm.

 My gang and I finding delight in an Island's breast, watching the sea's calm...................

Place and the Novel by Antonia Senior + February Competition

Our February guest is Antonia Senior - welcome! It's not often that February has 29 days and hence a guest slot on The History Girls. There's a competition too, so please scroll down when you have read Antonia's post.

Photo credit: Nick Roe

Antonia Senior is a writer and journalist. After studying History at university, she worked at The Times for fourteen years in a variety of roles, including acting Business Editor and Leader Writer. She became a freelance after the birth of child number 2, to concentrate on writing and reviewing books. Antonia writes the monthly round-up of the best new historical fiction in The Times’ Saturday books section. She is a judge for this year’s Historical Writers’ Association debut fiction crown. The Winter isles, the story of Somerled, the first Lord of the Isles, is out in paperback in April.

www.antoniasenior.com
@tonisenior

How the landscape of Scotland inspired and shaped my book: The Winter Isles.


No one thought I should write The Winter Isles. Its hero is a twelfth century Scottish warlord - a man more mythical than historical. A warrior in a brutal age. Me? I’m a middle-aged Mum who lives in London, and cries when my eyebrows are plucked. My agent was kind but wary, my publisher was tremulous. I was furious at my own obstinate insistence that this was the story that I wanted to tell.

The compulsion to write about Somerled was rooted in one thing: my absolute love of the place in which he lived. The wild West coast of Scotland is my favourite spot in the world. From beautiful Barra, with its machair-backed beaches and music-filled pubs, to the empty, purple hills of Ardnamurchan – this is the land that makes my urban soul howl to the moon with joy and hope. And I wanted to write about it.

I learned about Somerled, the first Lord of the Isles, at Finlaggan on Islay. This is the inland home of the later Lords, an eerie, rush-filled loch hemmed in by heather and grey skies. Somerled’s descendants – the Donalds from whom all the MacDonalds and others are descended – were based here.

There are places where you history breathes on your neck, whispers in your ear. That moment when the curtain shivers, and you can hear the clamour of voices, the stories that demand to be told and retold. I have felt that shiver in grand places: Hagia Sofia in Istanbul or the Pantheon in Rome. I have felt it in humble places: the ruined village of Mingulay, the grey mud left behind by the Thames at low-tide, where the hangman’s noose falls from the Prospect of Whitby sign in Wapping. There I was, at Finlaggan, amid the old stones and the drizzle, with an insistent voice in my head. I am the Lord of the Isles. Write my story.

So I did. I went looking for Somerled in the records - where he appears fleetingly and rarely as a sometime friend of, and sometime rebel against, the Canmore Kings of medieval Alba. I looked for him in the myths, where he is a pure Gaelic hero who fought off the rapacious Vikings. I looked for him in the DNA studies – which show him spreading his tangled Norse-Gaelic genes with near Genghis Khan levels of enthusiasm.

But there was not much to go on. His was not a culture of the written word. It was a culture of swords and sung poetry. As a historical fiction writer, I take the factual research incredibly seriously. My books on the English Civil War have been written on the shoulders of giant historians and mounds of primary material. The Somerled shelf on my bookcase – although as complete as I could make it – is slightly stocked.

The Winter Isles, therefore, called for much historical imagination – all rooted in a sense of place. How would this landscape shape the men? What burden would the women bear? How would they cope with the cold, the relentless wind, the winter storms? What would it feel like, to lie in the damp, dark heather, watching the light spill from your enemy’s hall – to be the eyes watching in the darkness? To be the watched?

Clues came from unlikely places. My husband and I were climbing a munro in winter with a lovely guide. His friend had experimented with hillwalking in thick, traditional tweed. It kept out the weather as well as modern gortex, said our guide, but once inside and by a fire, it steamed dry in great white clouds. The best historical fiction is filled with texture, with details like this one.

There were big problems with the knowledge gap. No one knows where Somerled’s main stronghold was. He must have had one. Local legend in Morvern places him at Ardtornish, near Lochaline – a nub of land which juts out into the Sound of Mull. The name means Thor’s Headland in Norse. There is an atmospheric ruined castle at Ardtornish – but its dates are out. There is no archaeological evidence that sites our twelfth century hero here.

Still, one morning, when staying alongside the incomparably beautiful Loch Aline, we walked out to Ardtornish Castle. It was a day of cool blue skies and violent winds. The waves whipped up the Sound of Mull, white-tipped. Across the water, Mull’s Ben More was snow speckled and unforgiving. From the water’s edge in front of the Castle, we could see all along the Sound in both directions. It was empty, but for the skirl of sea-birds. In the times of Gaelic dominion, these were busy seas – full of traders and merchants and travellers.

It seemed to me, standing on the edge of Somerled’s Morvern, that there was only one place he could have lived. Here. Scoured raw by the wind, and a rain that comes in sideways. But visible and dominant, and proud. Fact? No. But all historical fiction is a tangle of knowns and unknowns – and where there are known unknowns we must do our best to imagine fiercely and in good faith. We must rely on a sort of historical instinct.

So I wrote the book that no-one – least of all me - wanted me to write. It was inspired by the land, and rooted in it. And, readers, it has been greeted with a gratifying enthusiasm. Sometimes, perhaps, you have to write with your heart, as well as your head.

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